What Is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government (Paperback) 1636001882 9781636001883

This is a 1994 translation of one of the classics of the traditions of anarchism and socialism. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a contemporary of Marx and one of the most acute influential and subversive critics of modern French and European society. His What is Property? (1840) produced the answer Property is theft ; the book itself has become a classic of political thought through its wide-ranging and deep-reaching critique of private property as at once the essential institution of Western culture and the root cause of greed corruption political tyranny social division and violation of natural law. A critical and historical introduction situates Proudhon s diabolical work (as he called it) in the context of nineteenth-century social and legal controversy and of the history of political thought in general.